


july

by rainingvenus



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: 3racha music club, Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Alternate Universe - High School, Friends to Lovers, Inspired by Music, Love Confessions, M/M, Oneshot, and he overthinks, author is hyunjin lover before human, author is incapable of full stories, author is simply self-indulgent, author suggest the same to readers, but author loves confessions, jeongin just has a crush, kinda angsty because author had On track, on repeat for an entire night writing this, very sad boy jeongin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:47:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25494838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainingvenus/pseuds/rainingvenus
Summary: Hyunjin is leaving.Jeongin can’t let him
Relationships: Hwang Hyunjin/Yang Jeongin | I.N
Comments: 4
Kudos: 34





	july

**Author's Note:**

> since i will never finish the five million chaptered fics in my drafts ive decided to make myself feel better with this and if you ignored the tags i hope you read this with ‘On track’ on repeat to unlock the ultimate vibe of this mess of words. not my best work but that’s the essence of july. bittersweet poorly written summer love. bon apple teeth.

  
  
  


Rain has been pooling around Jeongin’s feet, and maybe something under the heading of fungus (“or fungus-like protoctista,” Hyunjin’s indignant voice rings in his head, “they are Not the same.”) The water laps around his ankles, and one of his slippers is floating in the narrow alley outside his kitchen. A frog hops to the step he sits on,eagerly skipping to another frog that waits there. He smiles at it despite the cold. Hyunjin. Everything reminds him of Hyunjin, and that everything feels horrible.

It is somewhere near the end of July, the time of summer where the entire week is like the weekend, only for Jeongin the days aren’t names. They are numbers. He doesn’t really recall ever caring for the date in this rainstruck part of summer, but this year he does. It has rained the entire week, and maybe it’s the sky’s way of resonating with the storm in Jeongin’s stomach or whatever you call the thing that seems to eat you up on the inside till all you feel is a single word. He exhales. His t-shirt is pale blue and unhelpfully airy as the rain flings a wind with itself.

It’s the kind of rain that turns the sky a nice blue, the kind that makes his garden smell insane. Fast merry rain. The weather isn’t angry, and neither is Jeongin. It just is. They both just are.

It is the 23rd of July. Hyunjin is leaving. Maybe that’s why it’s raining. Maybe it would’ve rained even if he wasn’t. Jeongin has spent the past 14 nights sobbing in his pillow because Hyunjin isn’t supposed to leave. He has spent the past 2 not sleeping for more than an hour, because he has been staring at his phone screen at the 205 diary entries in his notes that are titled hyunjin, that contain every single time Jeongin has felt his heart flutter because of his best friend. He has considered sending one to Hyunjin. He has unconsidered it. He has considered deleting them all. He has considered never speaking to him again. He has placed his phone on airplane mode for 5 days. He has opened his bleary eyes one evening in the dark of his room to find a shaken Chan and a fuming Changbin standing in the doorway. He has cried in their arms for the next three hours. He hasn’t told anyone what he tells them, and he is buried under blankets and their holds when he is done. Jeongin still isn’t angry, and Changbin is angry that he isn’t.

“You don’t deserve to stay like this.” he says.

Jeongin has never considered that. Somewhere from his shoulder and Chan’s hoodie they are using as a pillow, Chan pauses the gentle humming he is doing while stroking Jeongin’s hair.

“You deserve to be blessed,” Chan whispers softly.

“How can I be the one who decides that?” Jeongin asks with all the fear of the world in his eyes.

“Have you tried it?” Chan asks.

Jeongin has stared at his window where the rain still splashes past midnight.

For the first time, he wonders why he hasn’t.

Jeongin only knows one way to most things. He has been best friends with Hyunjin since he was born maybe. Maybe because Hyunjin was his soulmate, or maybe because he moved across the street 12 years ago. He had chocolate cereal for breakfast for 8 years. He went to the same school for 10. It rained every July and it snowed every February on his birthday. He liked the same boy for 3. Time flowed for Jeongin because he never needed to do anything with it. Feelings did come, and they did go, but he was _happy_ unlike most people. He liked his parents and he liked what he studied and so did they.

Hyunjin was glued to his side like a shadow, and that had always been enough. Hyunjin, star-eyed and soft-haired. Hyunjin always there to let him cheat off his Biology homework and hug him till he felt nothing was wrong. Hyunjin who would drop small kisses on Jeongin’s head when he wasn’t looking only to laugh till his eyes shut close and he fell from whatever he was sitting on at the exasperation on Jeongin’s face. Hyunjin whose skinny body would be practically swimming in the gigantic shirts he wore. Hyunjin who had no idea what to do with his long limbs after puberty hit except to wrap them around the nearest thing that was alive. Hyunjin who learned how to fly when he signed up for dance at school. Hyunjin who Jeongin used to be a foot shorter than, now only a few centimetres taller. Hyunjin who wasn’t awkward legs and silly huge grins anymore but graceful lilting arms and smirks that made Jeongin’s face red enough to forget how to breathe no matter how many times he saw them. 

  
  


There wasn’t a date to when Jeongin wished he knew more ways to things. It was a month maybe, maybe a year. Maybe it was just a figment of his imagination.

Time felt tight on Jeongin’s eyes. It felt miserable to move in. Hyunjin had always been enough, so why did he want more? Why did it feel pathetic all of a sudden to simply study and not do anything else with himself? Chocolate cereal wasn’t even that good. Pancakes were. Coffee was a relief when it had only been horrid a year ago. Listening to music didn’t feel enough, and the thought of making it did. Breakfasts and after-school hobbies could be replaced, but best friends couldn’t, and the weight of it lingered in his eyebags, on his permanently aching shoulders and sleepless nights; and so everything Jeongin felt for Hyunjin buried itself deep deep in a closed box he would open once a day the moment he’d step in the music club and meet the eyes of the curly-haired president.

Chan had only grinned when Jeongin said he wanted to make music, and Jeongin had spent the next month with his ears covered in headsets as he perched on a stool next to the older boy by large keyboards and a dramatic laptop, drinking in everything there was to know about production. A verse would sometimes spill out of his mouth, and he would let it. He would let himself sing every corner of his heart out. It wasn’t the same as Hyunjin, but it numbed something. It bandaged his stupid heart. It made Chan’s eyes sparkle. It allowed him to think of the time Hyunjin told him to not smile with his mouth closed when he had gotten his braces because Jeongin was handsome to him either way; when he had stopped showing his teeth in case he didn’t look nice enough. It made him not hate the butterflies in his stomach for a while.

It made him meet new friends who also ended up in the studio for the same reason. They would shout their throats out till it turned dark outside, him and a boy named Jisung whose midnight blue hair fell in his eyes. He was perhaps a year older, and he loved to pelt Jeongin with requests to sing for his songs, and Jeongin obliged because he didn’t have a reason not to. When he would, everyone would stop and listen. They all knew Jeongin was in love, but it was the same as everyone knowing Chan hated his birthday. There were things no one said out loud. Jeongin would arrive at Jisung’s classroom and quietly slide a sheet of all his woe-struck thoughts. Jisung would nod and rub his shoulder. A song mapped on them would wait for Jeongin the very next day of his request. A song wasn’t Hyunjin, but it was enough for then.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


He watches his hands streaked in raindrops. Of course everyone is young and foolish. Of course they are, and that’s the meaning of growth. He stares at his phone, a song by Changbin playing on the lockscreen. 

’Even a fool knows this,’

Changbin’s voice sings, and Jeongin almost laughs. It always feels like his songs are written to Jeongin. Maybe they are. Maybe Changbin just knows a lot of fools.

’You're the best thing I've got

Once again towards you’

’One more step, I will never stop

I shouldn't run away’

He clutches his face in his hands. Hyunjin is leaving in 8 hours, he might leave forever if Jeongin listened to Changbin.

  
  
  


‘I was always waiting so I didn't know anything

I didn't know’

  
  
  


He feels his throat well, and it is too cold now to sit any longer. Somehow, his floating slipper arrives to his feet. He slips it on, slowly wiping his face. He paters into the quiet of his house and pulls on the nearest hoodie he finds, shoving his phone in his short pockets. 

  
  
  


‘When will I know what it means to be cold everyday?’

  
  
  


He exhales as he steps out again, this time the rain falling on every inch of him except for his hood-covered head. Jeongin jogs across the street till he has time to think again, legs aching as he continues to the very end of the kilometre, and of course he remembers every time they raced across this road as boys. A shiver runs down his back and he doesn’t know if it’s from the cold. He halts by the streetlight across Hyunjin’s house. It flickers to life, bathing him in faded yellow despite it being 11 am in the morning. He exhales at it again. Hyunjin is leaving, and the whole world seems to be forgetting how to work at the thought of it. 

He watches the door, heart seeming to have forgotten how to beat normally, inhaling and exhaling. He barely hears the thundering of the rain over the deafening pounding in his ears, and he also almost misses the creak of the door as it opens with a crack of light peering out. A tall boy moves to block it, sliding himself out quietly. Jeongin’s eyes widen. Even in the shorts and years old t-shirt that probably belonged to Jeongin at some point, Hyunjin is handsome. His hair seems to have grown to fall past his ears in the past two weeks Jeongin hasn’t seen him, and it doesn’t help his already heightened heartbeat. Hyunjin doesn’t see Jeongin till he does, when he is done wiping away his face. Jeongin’s heart skips another beat because his best friend’s eyes are swollen and his face is red. He stops in his tracks and the streetlight is falling on his face in all its widened eyes and halted breath. 

“Jeongin-ah”

Hyunjin’s voice comes out as a small shaking cry, but Jeongin hears it louder than any of the rain around him. He runs without thinking, colliding into the older boy and pressing his entire body into his warmth. Two arms pull him closer immediately and everything smells of wet grass and Hyunjin’s shampoo. Hyunjin is crying, maybe Jeongin is too. He takes in large breaths but the suffocation doesn’t leave him. _He made Hyunjin sad, He made Hyunjin sad, He made Hyunjin this sad, He made Hyunjin sad enough to run into the rain._

“Hyunjin, hyunjin-ah, what is it?” he asks slowly, even though he doesn’t need to.

“You didn’t want to say goodbye?”

Jeongin feels something gently fall off a cliff inside him. He suddenly pulls away from the older, meeting his eyes with something fierce erupting in his chest. 

“No. Because I won’t let you go,” he says, his vision blurred.

Hyunjin watches him, shaking slightly.

“I’m selfish but I really need to stop being scared, so you can’t go. You can’t go because I have so much to tell you and I’ve been telling it to everyone but you and I don’t deserve it and neither do you.”

He doesn’t realise how soaked he is till he finally speaks. He realises how cold everything but his words and the boy in front of him are. He realises how if he won’t say it now, he will lose both.

“You’re my best friend,” 

Hyunjin is holding his breath. 

“but I like you more than that. That’s it. I just want more of you.”

For some reason at that moment, Jeongin remembers how he used to sing for Hyunjin. He’d never sing the songs he wrote in his music club, and Hyunjin didn’t even know he wrote. Jeongin wonders if Hyunjin ever had a hunch, or any idea about the way he’d been everything in Jeongin’s life for the past three years. Jeongin has never spoken himself out, and for the second time he wonders why he hasn’t. He wonders why he has never chosen to feel his heart reach his mouth with all this bravery that came from nowhere. He wonders why he never ran to Hyunjin’s house before like he did today. 

It is two sentences that change his life. 6 words that could take away everything away from him. (Hyunjin would’ve left even if it hadn’t been for these 6 words.) 

Hyunjin stares, or maybe he glares. Jeongin glares back. 

A disbelieving laugh leaves Hyunjin’s mouth.

“Why didn’t you say so before, you absolute fool?”

Jeongin blinks and looks at his wet mud-covered slippers. 

“I’m saying it now,” he whispers, his left foot slowly stepping backwards 

“Jeongin-ah, look at me.”

Jeongin looks. Hyunjin is dripping water and painted blue and yellow by the sky and smiling like he can never stop.

“Jeongin, I’m not leaving.”

Jeongin is frozen where he is, and he doesn’t register it when the other boy strides to him till he is an inch away from him, till all the warmth in his shaking breath is fanning over Jeongin’s face.

“You never said anything, even though it felt like you wanted to, and I’d been waiting for so long that I couldn’t bear it. That’s why i wanted to leave,” Hyunjin spoke, his voice gentle near Jeongin.

“You knew?” 

“I’m your best friend.”

Jeongin closes his eyes.

“Of course you are.”

He opens them again.

“But you’re okay with it? You knew and you still wanted to stay friends?”

Hyunjin is sad again. He is smiling and his eyes are watering with the sky.

“No, I wanted more too and I thought you didn’t.” 

Jeongin sighs and leans his forehead on the older’s shoulder, his head buzzing with a million thoughts. _Hyunjin knows and doesn’t hate him Hyunjin knows and still likes him Hyunjin_ **_knows_ ** _and still chooses to like him._

“Jeongin-ah, are you crying?” 

Jeongin doesn’t respond. He isn’t but if he speaks, he will.

“I just professed my love to you and all you do is cry on my shoulder?” He feels Hyunjin’s chest rumble with soft laughter under him, and he curls further into the older’s embrace. Maybe because it’s cold. Maybe because he can’t believe how easy this was. 

The rain slows to a drizzle on their heads, and when Jeongin finally summons the courage, after maybe an hour or maybe a minute, to pull back a little to look at his best friend, Hyunjin’s bangs are wet locks falling right into his eyes and Jeongin wants to brush them away, wants to run his fingers through them. 

Oh.

He could.

He could do it.

It feels so strange and so right to do this. Hyunjin is perfect under Jeongin’s slow hesitant strokes, he is melting under the touch. He is too dream-like.

“I feel like this is a dream,” he says.

“I can kiss you to prove it isn’t.”

Hyunjin whispers the words with the drizzle covering him.

Jeongin’s face is flaming too much to disagree, and so is his mind, because when Hyunjin leans forward after all those years of Jeongin just hallucinating this happening, he feels himself standing on his toes; he feels himself fly.

Jeongin is kissed by his best friend under a July rain storm and his best friend is kissed by him. Hyunjin tastes of peach lip balm, the colour of his gorgeous mouth. He feels like the endless summer shower and everything more Jeongin has wanted. They’re sloppy and silly because it’s raining, and Hyunjin laughs when his lip catches in Jeongin’s braces and a drop of something salty ends up on the tip of Jeongin’s mouth and he moves to breathe because Hyunjin has cut himself like the idiot he is. 

He doesn’t know if he should be exasperated or concerned or laughing because they’ve waited for this for too long and Hyunjin is sticking his tongue out to suck at the cut on his lip. Jeongin shakes his head and drags him into the house, kicking off their drenched slippers. Hyunjin’s mother doesn’t question the dripping wet boys in her kitchen as Jeongin bows to her on his way to the medicine cabinet. Hyunjin is perched on the shelf and his eyes don’t leave Jeongin as Jeongin rips open an alcohol swab. His considerably drier fingers gently pat it on the cut and Hyunjin winces louder than he needs to, earning no sympathy from Jeongin besides an amused smile. 

“You know, I’ve kissed you in my dreams before, so just once isn’t enough to convince me this is real,” he says as he crumples the wipe and tosses it into the trash can.

Behind him, the rattle of ice-cubes in a makeshift ice-pack (cubes in a napkin) sounds as Hyunjin hops off the counter. Two arms place themselves on either side of Jeongin while he is washing his hands. Jeongin turns to face wet fabric clinging to Hyunjin’s skin. 

“Good,” he says.

He steals a barely-there kiss before Jeongin can even think, and then it’s him pulling Jeongin by the wrist to his stairs, past the stairs to his roof where the rain has made puddles over puddles, loudly belting into Best Friend by Rex Orange County and Jeongin can’t believe himself. He jumps the last three steps to reach the roof before the older and kisses his perfect face till nothing and everything feels like it is falling in place, till he is warm enough in all his fingertips. Maybe he is crying because he’s run two flights of steps, or maybe because it’s raining and he wants to sing the world to this beautiful boy. 

  
  


’Once again towards you

One more step, I will never stop’  
  


Somewhere above them the sun peaks a little from between the rain-specked clouds. Somehow it lands right at the pink on Hyunjin’s cheeks and the glow on his breathless face, and Jeongin _knows_. Jeongin knows this is exactly what Chan meant when the rain practically dances to the lightest it can be on the sun’s cue. 

Jeongin is the one to bless himself. Jeongin is the one writing his fate, and Hyunjin is the sun he is touching. Hyunjin is not leaving, because Jeongin has decided so. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> No this was not as inspired by the movie Weathering With You as you think. I simply associate lovers with the rain too much for my health’s well-being, and I hope none of you take Jeongin too seriously. People don’t stay in real life if you want to, thus this story is written. There is a reason this is fiction. Author will not be held responsible for any false beliefs you depart with after reading this. Once again, author is self-indulgent and not delusional at all contrary to popular belief.


End file.
